Posts by Annihilator

IBM's monster tape will take three days to fill

Depends..

.. do these tape drives use helical scan? In which case, more bits/sqin, same length, but tape head moves faster.

New inside out hover-magnet fusion reactor debuts at MIT

Box

"Making the sun is easy. Its the box thats hard."

I've got an old shoe box sitting under the bed if it'll help? I mean I'll have to find somewhere else to put the photographs, but I'm sure I can do that. Will probably just buy new shoes.

You bring the sun, I'll bring the box, we'll meet tomorrow at 12.

Top Gear's Stig prowls Loch Ness

Hopefully

"Are there any other readers out there with no lives like me?"

Not sure, but if there are, can you invite them all round to your house? Be good to keep them in one place I think!...

Once impenetrable PS3 cracked wide open

Re: Huh?

"Obviously, if the console gets hacked, you can use it pretty much as a normal PC system - and as I said above - it would cost you less as such. Therefore, if you make it do what YOU want, the manufacturer looses money."

By your logic, the PC games industry doesn't make any money? Funny I didn't think that was the case.

Go

Liking this! I've still got my PS2 with a hard drive bolted in the back with all my games loaded on it. HD Advance does the rest. I still OWN these games, they're up the loft - but at my convenience they're playable in a flash.

Likewise the PS3 would be perfect if I could forego the discs. Frankly I'd even accept a "validate the disc once a month" approach. Then hacks like this would have less reason to exist.

Since Sony et al won't do this - go GeoHots.

Jumbo-jet laser cannon tested against missile

Good spin

"This test engagement was not intended to lethally destroy the missile"

Rule number one, always lower expectations. Then if it hit the real, secret objective (i.e. it blew up the missile) then you can claim epic success "ooh look, we don't know our own strength, I could crush a grape etc"

I'll bet there are still a few crest-fallen faces this morning.

Sennheiser RS 160 wireless headphones

They don't..

They're a completely different type of headphones. The Sony DR BT50s are for pure portability, i.e. walking about town.

The Sennheisers are tied to a base station in a fixed location.

China denies role in cyber attacks on Google

Always two there are..

.. a master and an apprentice.

Is amanfromMars training his replacement?

BT to throttle P2P for faster broadband

re: Gamers don't use much data..

It's not about how much gamers send. If it's identified as p2p, they'll throttle it regardless. Throttling in this case either means dropping packets or (worse) de-prioritizing/queuing the packets - i.e. "oh this is P2P stuff, it can wait"

"By de-prioritizing data heavy traffic, ISP's should be improving the gamer's connection."

Nope, they'll push pings up.

Ofcom opens debate on Freeview HD DRM to punters

What?

"Plus of course, how is a majority of TV footage ripped anyway? Simple! It's captured from the analogue (and decoded) video stream, then re-encoded using XVid or something"

You should try it my way and tap directly into the MPEG2 stream once you've demuxed it. Why on earth would you want to capture it analoguely?

TV captures would be rubbish if they were analogue.

OTA Firmware

Firmware gets pumped out over the airwaves these days and can very happily silently update the firmware.

1984 film classification law gets reboot

Empire Strikes Back

"Why, you stuck up, half witted, scruffy looking... nerf herder!"

I didn't see the original cinematic release - I assume it was something else.

On the other hand I used to enjoy watching Die Hard 2 progress over the years from:

"Yippee-ki-yay"

"Yippee-ki-yay f**ker"

"Yippee-ki-yay mother.."

"Yippee-ki-yay muthaf**r"

Emergency IE patch goes live as exploits proliferate

Worse

Not only does Windows 7 require a reboot, but it kindly does it on your behalf. Mine helpfully rebooted shortly after 3am this morning - still trying to unpick how far through a batch of video encodes it got.

Wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have a bootable linux USB plugged in at the time. So wasn't even Windows that restarted but Ubuntu. Maybe I should leave it that way...

Random reboot

That'll be why Windows had rebooted this morning. "Windows restarted after successfully applying a patch"

Windows 7 - I thought we were done with this sh1t Microsoft!

Wrists playing up? You're shagging too much

Man discovers sex

"Sexual intercourse can explain the increase in the overall incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome seen in recent years, since it is the most widely practised activity that uses both hands at the same time"

Hang on, let me just clear up what this dingbat thinks. He believes that CTS has increased in recent years, and it's because people have started having sex in the missionary position?

Sorry, I didn't realise sex was a recent invention. Let alone the missionary position.

Dingus. My own personal theory is people not having sex are probably more likely to develop CTS. Just in the one wrist mind.... Or maybe it's all this keyboard/mouse stuff that IS a relatively recent invention and generally speaking the bog standard ones (like we all get in an office environment) aren't very well designed from an ergonomic point of view.

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX1

Not great camera

Previously a fan of Cybershots but noticing they're all rather noisy these days - not sure why, and it's the most obvious thing from the sample shots regardless of ISO setting.

However to complain about MS Pro Duo slots - who cares - is this 1999?? I could argue that I've got a bunch of XD memory cards from my Olympus. I don't, but I could. I have a stack of MS Pro Duo cards, not only for PSP, but phone and past cameras.

BOFH-making bug plugged in D-link update

Yeah..

Speaking of "BOFH" - is he dead then and not coming back?

Singapore nightclub offers booze for boobs

Ahem

Woman walks into a bar and asks for a double entendre, so the barman gave her one.

MS spins IE security disaster into Windows 7 upgrade opportunity

Blow up a busload of kittens

You sir, have cheered me up at the end of a crap day. Mainly because I got an image of Keanu Reeves saying "whoa" a lot in a dead-pan voice while trying to stop said bus from dropping below 50.

Complete with Antonio Banderas/Puss In Boots on board.

2010 will be the year of the net tablet, claims analyst

Oh to be an analyst

Piece of p1ss this job. Let me guess how the conversation went...

"Ooh, Apple released the iPhone and it was very popular"

"Yes, isn't that something?"

"Ooh, have you heard the rumour they're releasing a tablet?"

"Yes I have, do you think it will be popular?"

"Yes probably, let's release a report saying that tablets will be popular this year."

"Good idea - if it turns out we were wrong, it'll be 2011 by then and every one will have forgotten"

"Brilliant!"

Avatar kills Taiwanese man

Everyone...

...dies a little inside when they see a recent Cameron film.

US makes travellers go online, before getting onboard

Virgin Atlantic

Yup, exactly the same story with Virgin Atlantic in summer '09. In fact they made me go upstairs and find an Internet cafe to do it.

At least I wouldn't have to fill in the green form and the blue form though. That would be silly. Oh... wait...

Apple's 'latest creation' debuts January 27

Sub edit

"Apple has invited selected member of the press and industry analysts to an event next Wednesday"

"Apple has invited everyone except us to an event next Wednesday"

There ya go, fixed that for you. :-P

NASA finds cocaine in Space Shuttle hangar

Boring or annoying

The average coke user I'd ended up talking to in a bar either ends up incredibly boring or annoying - or both. Can you just imagine what a NASA boffin turns into??

I may not even stop to pick up my coat should the chance to escape the conversation arise...

Survey outs Britain as nation of tech twits

Agreed

If asked "what's a VHD", I'd struggle. Hell, I'd struggle if they asked me "what's a VMDK" and I use those day to day.

Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB Sata 3.0 HDD

Years

"it'll be years before high capacity spinning drives will be able to take advantage of SATA 3.0, RAID or not"

Not really, the next doubling of density of the disk surface should push us into SATA3.0 realms.

Next-gen iPhone rumored for April

Dual core failure

You understand what dual-core means, right? And what multi-threaded means? And that the iPhone can be doing plenty of parallel things without multi-tasking apps?

Santa Fe man demands half a mill for being near iPhone

Blind testing

Piece of piss for the neighbour to humour him if required - tell him you're going to switch it off one night and get him to tell you which night he thinks it was.

Then just leave it on the whole week and tell him to f**k off when he tells you it must have been Tuesday night.

IBM software: big, blue and boring in the 2010s

Cool company

They were cool in 2000? Really? Playing chess? Putting Linux on OS390? (but ashamed of it so having to hide the fact)?

Greenpeace: Apple ain't so brown anymore

Windows box

You kept your Windows 7 box? Ripped the serial number sticker off, kept the CD's and dumped the box in day 2 :-)

Regardless:

"Steve Jobs' turtleneck is made out of orca foreskin, right?"

I just lived the cliché by almost spitting coffee out when I read that :-) Very good job.

TalkTalk kills Tiscali

The name

What's quite brilliant is that I managed to go through their whole existance without knowing exactly how it was pronounced. Was it tisk-ill-ay or tisk-ah-lay?

Galileo sat-nav contracts, startup dates announced

Dithering gone

The 10m inaccuracy of GPS is standard. The deliberate dithering varied to +-100m which was the civilian service. This was switched off under the Clinton administration. The inaccuracies come from random delays of the signal through the atmosphere.

However, accuracy can be further enhanced by using information obtained through other means. For example, a TomTom pretty much assumes you will be on a road. A boat sat nav will assume you are at sea-level. You can also use Kalmann filters when moving. The more satelites you can see will also help.

As for strapping a GPS onto an ICBM, you can't without licencing the tech through the Pentagon/whoever. Standard GPS receivers don't work above 60,000 feet or at speeds greater than 1,000 knots - pretty much where you'd expect an ICBM to operate.

Russian GPS

Intelligence agencies would quickly figure out that ICBMs had been primed with GPS chips. Would be the quickest defence system.

"Russian launch detected. Quick! Switch off GPS for a couple of minutes!"

Mind you, I don't think ICBMs have the option of slowing down for a bit to try and hasten the "determining GPS location... please wait..." like we do with TomToms.

Facebook offs social suicide service

ActiveX control

Presumably the next step is for these companies to enable either a downloadable app or an activeX control etc to do all these delete steps but from your IP address instead.

Masses marvel at 'Most Useless Machine'

Inverse Perpetual Motion Device!

We're almost there folks...

Dubai cuts ribbon on world's tallest building

Sand

Yeah I always wondered that. Then I got to think what the missing ingredient of concrete was.

Cement, water and, erm, that other thing.

Please shut up about the Mull of Kintyre Chinook crash

Necessary?

"If you want to be nasty to the dead pilots, you would ask why they were flying so low in such terrain and such conditions - a factor that the FADEC can't be blamed for - but that's beyond the scope of this article and we see no reason to be nasty"

So... why raise it?...

US feds squeeze bloggers for posting TSA orders

Completely agree

Presumably they will remove all windows from planes. On internal UK flights, I have a fairly good idea of where we are from time to time by looking out the window.

Not to mention, unless they randomise the route and speed, you could rely on the schedule, assuming you left on time.

Still, if it makes them feel better. Time to go and re-watch the South Park episode "The Entity".

Court: iPod hearing loss your fault, not Apple's

Microwaved Poodle

1998 film aptly titled "Urban Legend"

Apple iPad to launch January 26 (maybe)

Journalism

I really really love it :-)

"The Reg tried to confirm the Financial Times report about the January 26 date, but the Yerba Buena Center for the Art's facilities rental website was "temporarily offline while it is being updated" when we tried to access it at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Standard time on Wednesday, and their office didn't immediately respond to our request for comment."

Fanciest description of "their website was down and they didn't answer the phone" I've ever seen.

Interaction

"you'll be surprised by how you interact with the tablet"

Any bets it's an Etch-A-Sketch?

O2 takes a Christmas break

Inquiring minds

"is this for 3G data or home broadband"

Logical minds would probably jump to the conclusion it's 3G data, just from the references to APNs and iPhones. Or by reading the linked article where it's happened before.

El Reg's PARIS programme attracts high-flying sponsor

More money

Why not take Sky's approach to this and make it a paper view event?...

Parcelforce fails to deliver for Windows 7 lovers

and...

OK, so "what is your point caller?"

I don't get how this is anyone elses fault but ParcelForce's (or whoever designed their payment engine). Windows 7 is *NOT* the problem here. It's whoever decided to check the OS in the user-agent string. For all they could know, I'm running IE8 on any platform I (feasibly) like.

Stanford prof pops lid on paint-on battery tech

Groan...

"Decorators will soon be charging more"

That is truly awful.

I'll get your coat (of paint). And mine please.

Google chief: Only miscreants worry about net privacy

A fair question

For now we'll assume we live in the same wonderful USA where this Schmidt bell-end lives. Take a look at (not least) the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and to an extent 9th amendment in the constitution this United States governement is sworn to uphold... or so we're told. America! (we love you) (with apologies to Slim)

In the UK, there's again no specific law, but a multitude: http://www.yourrights.org.uk/yourrights/privacy/index.html

Spook firm readies Virgin Media filesharing probes

Yes, no, how and get a better ISP

If you make yourself a TOR network endpoint, it absolutely falls to your liability. It's pretty much written into every ISP's Ts&Cs. Why do you think people are using TOR?

Encrypted P2P only helps with DPI. All an ambulance chaser has to do is join the swarm and knows who you are (well, what your IP is - and it's getting closer to that being the same thing)

How do you spoof an IP address to download something? You can't. Have seen this misunderstanding of IP spoofing all over the land with regard to this. It's like ordering stuff off Amazon with a stolen credit card and having it delivered to a fake address. All well and good, but you'll never receive the stuff! But incidentally, at the moment our legal system says you don't have to prove anything. Though that seems perilously close to changing.

As for your Sky router - get a better ISP is all I can suggest!

Dongles pricey and pointless, says Bluetooth SIG

Unless

You have an iPhone and get screwed by O2 for a "tethering" charge.

In all other instances, I agree - have used a multitude of phones tethered over bluetooth.

Fanboi site squeaks on crocked iMacs

If you build it they will come

Man sets up website looking for people with faults in a product. Man finds like-minded people on website.

I wonder how many hits they'd get if he set up bugger_all_wrong_with_my_mac.thanks.com? Oh wait, probably none, because nobody complains if it works.

*/ goes off to see if he can't register the domain ihaveacomplaint.com to darken the world just a little bit further

Pig plague alert: Avoid missionary position

With a nod to Sheldon Cooper

"I've had pig plague and I really didn't fancy sex at the time anyway"

If influenza wasn't contagious after symptoms manifested themselves, it would have disappeared a long time ago. Between cave dwelling and tool building, Homo habilis would have figured out to kill the guy with the runny nose.